It has become a common experience. An ordeal that everyone accepts to expect to go through in life. What was an exception is now the rule for every father, mother, brother or sister. Age is not much of an issue any more, nor is anything else for that matter. 

It either strikes you, or it hits a loved one, or both. It is a question of time, of when, not if. There is no escaping this reality because it will just catch up with us, wherever we are, whatever we do. So we might as well acknowledge it, brace ourselves, and talk about it, because talking about it makes it much easier to handle than just thinking about it.

So cancer clearly attacks in pairs or clusters, except in the case of an Eleanor Rigby, of course.

I’m making this statement because though cancer is not contagious from a medical standpoint, because abnormal mitotic activity is restricted within the person hosting the tumour, the effect that the diagnosis and treatment of cancer has on the psyche and mental state of the minds closest to the cancer host, is noteworthy. Not simply noteworthy, but significant to the extent that the behaviour of the people around the directly afflicted might be crucial to their ultimate all-round recovery.

Therefore, faced with such a challenge, I prefer to think about it, try to understand it and empower myself to handle it, not just for my benefit, but in an endeavour to remain of some use to others.

Needless to say, on hearing the news, the instinct is to dissolve, to vanish, to cease to exist in a last ditch attempt to avoid the poisoned arrow hissing through the air with predatory velocity as it singles one out with a savage precision. Such a sensation is only momentary, however.

For, almost instantaneously, it is the human instinct itself which dissolves and melts. It almost tangibly decomposes into a much more ancient, primordial form of instinct...

One starts feeling like a snail.

Not like Henri Matisse’s colourful snail in the celebrated spiral, feel-good factor-inundated collage, but like the fragile, slimy, deaf creature, struggling under the weight of a fragile shell made of cheap calcium carbonate in concentric circles of life pigmented in dull shades of brown and interspersed with the odd and duller dirty white ring.

Yes, I am one of many feeling like the snail we absentmindedly crush so often when we are out for a walk in the countryside after the first rain.

And just like the gastropod and its 500 million-year-old predecessor, my instinct is to swiftly withdraw, recoil, disappear in the shell and spit out enough calcareous mucus to wall me up for the next two seasons at least, and all this as a result of the slightest, briefest, even unintended touch.

Yet, even this sensation is fleeting. The urge to capitulate, break down and withdraw disappears as fast as it takes to let the thought swim from one temporal lobe of the brain to an ipsilateral frontal lobe and back. Then it’s gone. In its place comes the backdrop phase.

It might come as a surprise to you that I have always been intrigued by theatre productions. My love affair with the theatre goes back to my childhood. I was lucky enough to take part in many plays in and out of school, and I will never forget rubbing my face against the magnificent velvet green curtain at the Manoel Theatre just to make sure that it wasn’t a dream and I was actually part of a production on that stage. Theatre thoughts bring me incredibly happy thoughts. Nostalgic memories of the time when my humble school, my best friend and myself carried all the acting awards. We didn’t have resources for the most arresting backdrops but we had ourselves and our pride and the zeal to put our village on the theatrical arts map. It is very unfortunate that even those happy thoughts have a very bitter devastating edge to them, however, because my best friend Carmen Mangion died a couple of months after that exceptional experience. She had leukaemia and neither of us knew. We were both 10 years old.

Still, nothing can take away the happy moments we spent on stage, rehearsing and performing (and playing hide and seek in the ghost-ridden theatre) while our student colleagues took care of the colourful weighty backdrops that transformed our stage.

I remember looking at these backdrops as necessary evils, recycled contraptions of mangled art, depicting incongruous and simple scenes, stationary, unchanging, looking on us actors, as they had looked on those that came before us and those that would follow us.

The backdrops supported our acts and we needed them, but we lived in constant fear of being summoned to start the next act before the right backdrop was firmly in place, which would render our act out of context, or worse than that that, that in the rush to change the scene, the backdrop would be loosely fixed, would become unhinged, collapse and crush us.  Yet we never even mentioned these fears, as if by not speaking about them we would prevent them from happening. Moreover, neither my friend, nor myself ever wanted to become part of the crew that created the backdrop because we were not backdrop types. We were actors. I still am and had my friend survived she would be too. So again, by not mentioning backdrops we thought we would avoid becoming backdrop girls!

So it is only now, in this cancer scenario, when it naturally follows that I myself become a tattered, recycled, ever-changing backdrop struggling to support an unfolding drama, while remaining an actor ever on stage at the same time, that I have come to really, appreciate the invaluable crew that keep the backdrop intact, help it change in time and with time, and more importantly, keep it from crashing and crushing the actors.

Therefore, I dedicate these words to all the backdrop crew out there who come in countless forms, for their invaluable support. Simply saying thank you is not enough, I know, but I’m saying it nevertheless.

THANK YOU